You might be wondering, what is digitalisation? Digitalisation is the process of adopting digital technology by a company to improve business processes, value for customers and innovation. It is typically defined as the process of converting analogue information into a digital format. When planning for a digital transformation, organizations must factor in cultural changes required when adopting unfamiliar technologies.

Many mistake digitisation and digitalisation as the same thing but there is a much deeper difference between the two. Digitisation refers to the act of converting a physical document into a digital one. On the other hand, digitalisation means transforming and improving an entire business model using digital processes. In this blog, we will learn about what is digitalisation?

How Can Digitalisation Help Your Business?

You know what is digitalisation, now let us learn how it can help your business. That is to say, the main reason to digitalise your business is that it is not a trend but the way the whole world is heading. The purpose is to enable automation, increase data quality, and collect and structure all that data so we can apply advanced technology such as better and smarter software. The outcome of digitalisation is higher process efficiency, lower costs and better control. That is to say, both for the individual company and the network of connected businesses. The digitalisation of business helps to improve the efficiency of its process, consistency, and quality. It can:

• Integrate conventional records or files into a digitalised form, eliminating redundancies and shortening the communications chain
• Improve informational exchange
• Help in providing customer service anywhere in the world
• Reduce operational cost
• Prevent human error
• Take advantage of analytics & real user data
• Improve the continuity of business growth

Digitalisation implies an enhancement of business activities with the support of information technology to simplify communication systems. It helps firms identify the best partner companies and collaborate with them. It helps in generating new growth opportunities. In addition, it helps in capturing and holding customers and potential customers directly. It is important for companies to adopt digitalisation in their businesses in order to gain a competitive edge and keep pace with competitors. That is to say, Digitalisation is growing and is being accepted across industries. With the world rapidly shifting from offline to an online model of business, digitalisation is now a strategic imperative for organizations across domains.

You learnt about what is digitalisation but you might still be wondering how it can improve your relationship with consumers. Below are some reasons as to why you should digitalise:

• Increase Productivity

Digitalisation allows you to better evaluate all production processes, test each step and identify problems accurately. That is to say, it allows businesses to be more efficient.

• Reduce Operating Costs

It reduced the operating costs up to 20% and improves efficiency. In addition, it enables efficient cost management that implies a more effective control of production and sale processes. It also allows companies to create new business models and income sources.

• Improve Customer Experience

Moreover, it helps provide a better customer experience and improves communication with customers. It generates a closer bond with clients and prospective customers. In addition, it allows the use of new sales channels. For example, e-commerce or social media networks. To sum up, just developing a website allows companies to be in the market twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

• Facilitate Internal Process Integration

It allows business systematization and organizational development. As a result, this process increases consistency in work output because everyone doing the same job is following the same instructions. In addition, due to a standard process to work from, everyone has the same efficiency.

• Open New Market Possibilities

It enables the incursion into new markets. That is to say, before the rise of technologies, the distance was an obstacle for business internalization. But now all you need is a good digital communication strategy and have the right logistics to reach new markets.

• Strengthen & Enhance Your Brand

For many businesses, digitization not only implies a great fluency of their internal processes but also gives the organization a competitive advantage in the market.

How Can You Digitalise Your Business?

Now that we know what is digitalisation, it is time to learn how can you digitalise your business? The digitalisation of an organisation is not a goal but a way to improve business management and increase productivity. That is to say, digitalisation is not an option, but a necessity if you want your company to be successful. Due to the constant technological transformations, the market has evolved. Effective business digitalisation is based on these steps:

• Start From The Bottom Up By Establishing A Business Network

Most digitalisation showcases are singled out projects. That is to say, the tendency is to start with wireless networks because the source is limited. Why does the space not extend further between businesses at a faster pace? Considering the technology to do so is already available? That is to say, not having an established business network or a network of companies strategically working together to improve business operations between suppliers, customers, distributors and other third-party entities. It is better to embrace the business dynamics and build your digitalisation strategy around networks that connect your different ERPs and applications. To sum up, without a business network, your underlying data quality will not be good enough for the rest of your business applications to reach their full potential.

• Tap Into The Power Of High-Quality Data

The crudest way to start digitalising written business communication is to scan physical documents and digitise these business transactions. That is to say, today the infrastructure, regulations and technology to implement end-to-end digitalisation of your business transactions already exist in most places across our globe. In addition, once you have all your transactions digitised, you can start collecting data. And this is when it starts to get interesting. Essentially, any business is a small step from realising a digitalisation strategy and tapping into big data. Most stop after digitising the transaction and thus miss the opportunity of digitalising the complete business network to start harvesting the vast amounts of data that resides in the transactions.

For each order and invoice, there is so much more information stored than any one person or department might realise. For example, trends, patterns, pricing insights and buyer preferences are just the beginning. The data will flourish, enabling to tap into new insights, and allowing the company as a whole to move forward making better business decisions.

• Opt For The Holistic Approach To Digitalisation

Business leaders seldom see the promised or expected benefits of digitalisation from a holistic view, but if we continue to work with digitalisation in siloed approaches the full benefits will remain untapped.

For example, take the life cycle of a single transaction. The accounting department is usually concerned whether the amount is correctly booked to the right accounting code or if the invoice or order is compliant with accounting rules and legal requirements. The IT department is more concerned about the transaction getting stuck somewhere, lost or even stolen. The supply chain department is busy digitalising its flow of goods and production sites with IoT gadgets and is not necessarily concerned about the financial settlement. Meanwhile, the CEO is wondering what happened to the digitalisation strategy the board decided on a while back.